Ethnicity, development and gender: Tsáchila indigenous women in Ecuador

In recent decades, indigenous populations have become the subjects and agents of development in national and international multicultural policy that acknowledges poverty among indigenous peoples and their historic marginalization from power over development. Although the impact of these legal and programmatic efforts is growing, one persistent axis of disadvantage, male–female difference, is rarely taken into account in ethno-development policy and practice. This article argues that assumptions that inform policy related to indigenous women fail to engage with indigenous women's development concerns. The institutional separation between gender and development policy (GAD) and multiculturalism means that provisions for gender in multicultural policies are inadequate, and ethnic rights in GAD policies are invisible. Drawing on post-colonial feminism, the paper examines ethnicity and gender as interlocking systems that structure indigenous women's development experiences. These arguments are illustrated in relation to the case of the Tsáchila ethno-cultural group in the South American country of Ecuador.     

Firing technique characterization of black-slipped pottery in Praeneste by low field 2D NMR relaxometry

This study was aimed at individuating characteristics related to the pottery’s firing technique of Classical Roman producers, through the low field single-sided NMR relaxometry. The approach is based on a recent method of analysis, the correlation of the longitudinal and transverse NMR relaxation times of a liquid probe (in this case distilled water) filling the porous system of ceramics. The analyzed findings form two homogeneous classes with dating and place of production well established through the producer trademarks. Pottery findings belong to the black-slipped pottery productions of the Latin ancient city of Praeneste between third and second century B.C. and have been attributed to two different ”patriziae” production families: gens Samiaria and gens Trebonia. A further fragment with Greek kylix style, found in the same archaeological area, has also been analyzed, in order to understand if it had been imported from Greece, or made in Praeneste in imitation of the Greek style.     

Children and Print Visual Culture During the Chilean Popular Unity Government

This article analyses the visual figuration of children during the Chilean Popular Unity government (1970–1973) in a diverse archive of photographs, posters, album covers, magazines, and comics. First, it reads the realist representation of children in photography, which emphasises the dramatics of poverty as a form of establishing a photographic “civil contract” (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008). Second, it interprets posters and texts concerning the Allende government’s Plan de Leche (Milk Plan) as an affirmative biopolitics. It concludes by showing that the children on illustrated posters are the idealised version of childhood projected by adults as a way of imagining a coming community.     

The "Metaphor of Life": Herder's Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments in Late Eighteenth-Century Natural Sciences

The origins of the evolutionary concept of history have normally been associated with the development of an organicist notion of society. The meaning of this notion, in turn, has been assumed as something perfectly established and clear, almost self-evident. This assumption has prevented any close scrutiny of it. As this article tries to show, the idea of "organism" that underlies the emergence of the evolutionary concept of history, far from being "self-evident," has an intricate history and underwent a number of radical and successive redefinitions from the mid-eighteenth century up to approximately 1830 (the heyday of Romanticism and the period in which the first modern "philosophies of history" took form). More specifically, this paper traces some of these transformations in order to contextualize and shed some new light on Herder's philosophy of history and the complex process of its inception—a process that was not concluded by the end of his intellectual career. As the article shows, Herder did not actually succeed in solving some key problems involved in an evolutionary concept of history. The difficulties he found were analogous to those that emerged at that very moment in the development of a dynamic, onto-genetical theory (that is, a theory of the embryo's transformation), and both were ultimately linked to the combination of some uneven developments produced in the natural sciences of that time. Herder's philosophy of history thus appears as a paradoxical (and highly unusual, seen from a epistemological point of view) case of a system of thought that formulates problems which it is still radically unable to solve, lacking the tools to devise a possible solution for them.